Marc McEvoy

Brigid Delaney was once forced to dress up as her namesake, the former game show host Delvene Delaney, and wander the streets of Melbourne asking passers-by to guess who she was. It was part of her initiation at the University of Melbourne's Newman College when she was a first year arts-law student in the 1990s.

The way it was: Lawyer turned international journalist Brigid Delaney at her St Kilda home.

For residential university students, initiations are commonplace and, usually, tame. Sometimes, however, things can get out of hand, as happened at St John's College at the University of Sydney in 2012 when a female student was rushed to hospital after being forced to consume a cocktail of alcohol, dog food and shampoo. The incident resulted in more than 20 students being expelled from the Catholic college.

Delaney's debut novel, Wild Things, is about what can go wrong during student initiations. ''Where it gets shady is when the activities aren't silly and fun,'' she says. ''They are dangerous, such as eating or drinking something that is going to make you unwell … or forced to do 'sexercises', where women lie on the ground while men did push-ups over them, or being dumped in the middle of nowhere with no clothes on.''

Delaney, a 40-year-old journalist and former lawyer from St Kilda who who was born and raised in Warrnambool with three younger brothers, says she had a positive experience at Newman College.

''When you come from the country and you don't know anyone, and you are without your parents for the first time and lack a support structure, it allows you to feel like you have a community, and the rituals allow you to feel like you have earned a place within that community,'' she says.

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One of her initiations involved the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Peta Credlin, who was an older student at that time. ''We all lined up in a quadrangle and these limousines pulled up and people got out dressed in academic gowns and sunglasses who were extremely threatening, screaming at us,'' says Delaney. ''One of them was Peta Credlin. I have never been able to watch her on TV since without shivering.''

The practice of rituals using abuse and humiliation to initiate a person into a group, known as hazing, has resulted in some deaths in colleges in the US. In Wild Things, a Malaysian student, Alfred, joins a cricket club group at an Australian college called St Anton's. Alfred is taken on a bush journey that goes wrong when it turns into a violent alcohol-fuelled initiation ceremony that leaves him in a coma. Physical evidence suggests he has been whipped and raped.

The novel centres on the insular world of the group's alpha-male ring-leaders, who, along with a college master, close ranks when police investigate the overseas student's ''accident''. It is a compelling story about abusive power within a privileged campus and its moral breakdown through the need for identity and acceptance.

In one incident a woman is pinned to the ground with croquet hoops after being raped on a cricket oval. A similar event, reported in The National Times in 1977, allegedly occurred at St Paul's, Sydney University's Anglican college.

Delaney says Wild Things, which she began writing 10 years ago, is entirely fictitious and unrelated to events at St John's College. However, she has drawn on her own experiences, including when she worked as a live-in tutor at St John's in 2001.''For this generation raised on Harry Potter, there is a perverse sort of Harry Potter-esque twist to a lot of it. It's weird clubbishness, very British, and if you're a fairly unsophisticated kid from the country and Peta Credlin turns up in a limousine in a gown and orders you to do something ridiculous, you are going to do it.''